House chairman says ‘amnesty’ violates president’s own rules

Federal immigration authorities have begun granting tentative legal status to illegal immigrants under President Obama’s deportation halt — and in some cases are even ignoring the administration’s eligibility rules to stop deportations for those who shouldn’t qualify, according to the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

Mr. Smith also obtained documents laying out how U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE) officers should actively search for illegal immigrants who are “apparently eligible” to have their cases dropped. Those illegal immigrants then would be granted tentative status.

“President Obama is granting amnesty to illegal immigrants behind Americans’ backs,” Mr. Smith said. “Although administration officials told congressional offices that it would take 60 days to implement the president’s amnesty plan, internal ICE documents show that illegal immigrants have already benefited from it, even though there are no standards in place.”

The Washington Times reviewed the documents, which also included an ICE memo telling illegal immigrants to contact U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that will judge most of these cases, and which is not taking requests until Aug. 15.

The agency didn’t return a call seeking comment, but ICE spokeswoman Gillian Christensen said the policy was always intended to apply immediately to illegal immigrants already in the deportation system — which are the ones ICE deals with.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services will eventually put in place a more formal process for illegal immigrants to come forward and proactively head off deportation.

Ms. Christensen said ICE will end up with a relatively small share of the eventual cases, and their review is easier because the agency already had begun using broad prosecutorial discretion last year.

“ICE is only reviewing cases for deferred action of individuals that are currently in removal proceedings or who were/are part of the agency’s larger prosecutorial discretion review,” she wrote in an email.

Obama’s new orders

Last month, Mr. Obama and Ms. Napolitano said they would unilaterally halt deportations for illegal immigrants who would have qualified for the Dream Act — legislation that never passed Congress but would have granted a path to citizenship to many illegal immigrants age 30 and younger.

To avoid deportation under the new rules, illegal immigrants would had to have been brought to the U.S. by age 16; graduated high school or earned an equivalency degree; not been convicted of major crimes; and been in the U.S. for at least five years.

Those granted a stay of deportation are given permission to work in the U.S. — which could lead to hundreds of thousands of new, legal workers entering the economy.

The program has come under fire from both sides. Some immigrant-rights activists have said they’d be reluctant to recommend illegal immigrants come forward, saying the program doesn’t yet have the kinds of assurances they need.

Critics on the other side, meanwhile, say it’s drawn too broadly. They also wonder what proof ICE and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officers will ask for. The ICE guidance Mr. Smith obtained doesn’t lay out any standards for those documents, and he said that’s an invitation to fraud.

He also said he has learned ICE has halted deportations for illegal immigrants the agency knows have been in the U.S. for less than five years.

“Amnesty has been granted to those who have been here for a shorter or even unknown period of time,” Mr. Smith said.

Ms. Christensen, the ICE spokeswoman, said the agency has broad authority to halt deportations on a case-by-case basis, even when illegal immigrants fall short of the new standards, especially in “humanitarian” cases in which the people in question were brought to the U.S. as children.

“As part of ICE’s overall effort to focus the immigration system on public safety threats, border security and public safety, and in keeping with the spirit of the secretary’s memorandum, deferred action has been granted on a case-by-case basis to some individuals whose cases may differ from the specific criteria set forth in the memorandum,” Ms. Christensen said.

As for documents, she said ICE officers are already trained in what documents to ask for and how to evaluate them as part of their jobs. Acceptable documents they can request include passports, visas, school or medical records, and leases, she said.

Deciding who stays

Part of Mr. Obama’s dilemma on immigration is that Ms. Napolitano has said the U.S. has the resources to deport about 400,000 illegal immigrants a year, which means it has to live up to that level.

The president has tried to focus deportation efforts on Illegal immigrants with criminal records and had made progress in his first two years in office. But the latest statistics showed backsliding this year.

In fiscal year 2012, which began Oct. 1, about 49 percent of all illegal immigrants deported didn’t have criminal records. That’s up from about 44 percent last year — and the change had immigrant-rights advocates furious.

ICE said it’s trying to focus its priorities, and said even though criminal deportations are down slightly, most of the noncriminals are still important targets for deportation.

Of the more than 143,000 noncriminal illegal immigrants removed from Oct. 1 to June 23, nearly half had repeatedly violated immigration rules, and more than 49,000 others were recent entrants who were removed at the border.

A little fewer than 5,000 illegal immigrants, or less than 2 percent of the total, were rank-and-file illegal immigrants who didn’t fall into any of the administration’s target categories.

Americans are disgusted with immigration policy for good reason

President Obama’s State of the Union address – coupled with recent troubling decisions by his administration to expand a pattern of de facto amnesty for illegal immigrants – cemented the unfortunate reality that this president continues intentionally to abdicate a responsibility to advance serious immigration reform. Empty rhetoric, repetitive platitudes and continued support for the already-rejected Dream Act do not make up a comprehensive proposal to this complex policy issue.

These remarks follow the administration’s decision to ease certain regulations on the visa program and move to release some deportation cases by focusing solely on whether a person poses “a national security threat,” only the latest addition to a list of blatant unilateral White House orders intended to curry favor with Hispanics.

The politics is conniving: Portray reform-minded Republicans and conservatives as unsympathetic to this fastest-growing demographic sector and bolster the president’s re-election chances in swing states with significant Hispanic votes, such as Florida, New Mexico, Virginia, Colorado and Arizona.

This scheme is not only misguided, but to someone who legally entered this great nation as a youth, it’s appalling.

I join most Americans, especially fellow Hispanics, across the political and ideological spectrum who understand the importance of legal immigration as vital to sustaining the greatness of America’s economic and cultural fabric.

It’s an absurd idea – fronted by liberals and often a complicit media – that legal immigrants, including Hispanics, who chose to follow the rule of law and contribute to the American community would be willing to give a subservient pass – let alone their vote – to politicians who embrace and promote the politics of illegal immigration and leave nearly 12 million undocumented aliens in limbo.

With a broken system, illegal immigration makes a mockery of the promise of legal immigration, and the American people are rightfully fed up.

According to a Gallup poll released last week, liberals were the only ideological or party segment to express greater satisfaction than dissatisfaction with current levels of immigration. All others, including Democrats, supported a decrease in immigration levels.

Gallup also found that “Americans’ dissatisfaction with immigration ranks third highest among 17 issues Gallup asked about.”

It’s little wonder that immigration is gaining as a critical election-year issue, with voters questioning inaction on reform.

Republicans in their presidential primary are taking note and debating immigration proposals – as they should. As Florida, my home state, takes center stage in the primary cycle, expect voters to demand more answers on immigration. Today, the leading Republican candidates will address the Hispanic Leadership Network’s annual conference in Miami, hosted by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. It’s the perfect opportunity for them to outline their specific proposals.

There is little chance that Congress will address significant immigration reform this year. However, the issue must be a top priority in the first 100 days of 2013, and any serious reform legislation must embrace these key principles: vastly improved border security; visa reform for highly skilled workers, investors and agricultural workers; and the documenting of the millions of illegal immigrants already here.

The first priority must be to develop a comprehensive border-security-and-surveillance strategy to include increased border manpower, strengthened border barriers, expanded surveillance capabilities, enhanced investigative personnel and enforced border detention.

We cannot afford porous borders and unknown people – potential security risks – living in our country and taxing our state and local communities’ safety-net budgets.

Then, Congress must implement a nationwide mandatory employment verification program with enhanced employer penalties. This will require all illegal immigrants to register, and those who state a desire to leave voluntarily will have the right to apply subsequently for admission without prejudice.

They must admit to their unlawful presence in the United States and waive any claim for asylum. Work-permit opportunities would be available to those without criminal records who can demonstrate proof of employment when filing an application. In such cases, there is no direct path to citizenship, and recipients of work permits must have paid income taxes, have health insurance and must pay fines and penalties.

Special rules will be developed for the elderly, disabled individuals, students and those in military service, longtime agricultural workers and aliens brought to the United States as innocent children younger than 12.

Thereafter, the Department of Commerce would determine the number of temporary work permits to be made available annually to fulfill the needs of America’s employers.

With regard to high-skilled immigration, master’s and doctoral-degree graduates from U.S. universities in science, technology, engineering and math areas will receive visas as long as they have job offers.

No law will be perfect and please every constituency, but the time is urgent; action must be taken, and every congressional leader who abhors dealing with the topic should bite the political bullet and agree to a comprehensive reform package in early 2013 for the good of the nation.

I’m confident that this election cycle will elevate the debate on immigration reform because the American people have realized what the administration and liberals in Congress have not: The current attitude of sanctioning illegal immigration as a blatant political ploy places our economy and communities at risk and is simply unacceptable.

Last week, President Barack Obama took the latest step on his road toward an arrogant, new authoritarianism with four illegal appointments that entirely trampled on the Constitution’s requirements. More troubling still, the President chose to shred the Constitution all in the name of serving his Big Labor agenda while killing jobs in the process.

The President’s actions once again gave voice to his animating view of governing: doing so is much easier when one isn’t constrained by the Constitution and its checks and balances. “We can’t wait,” the President exclaimed after unilaterally appointing Richard Cordray as director of the newly inaugurated Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). He also appointed three officials to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), two of whom had been nominated less than a month before.

The policy implications of the President’s appointments? The CFPB will now have unmitigated authority to issue regulation upon regulation, contributing to the already-crippling red tape that is strangling business in America. And the NLRB will have the power to advance the President’s agenda to bolster unions across the country at the expense of job growth in a smarting economy.

For what, exactly, can’t the President wait? Quite simply, constitutional republicanism — the system of checks and balances integral to American government and political freedom. He grew impatient with the delays that inevitably accompany any legislative action an acted outside the Constitution’s mandated process. But the American people should ask, “Is such action really preferable to a deliberative, if slower-moving, constitutional republic?”

The President’s appointments last week, troubling as they are, are but the next steps on the road to a despotic form of governance that has come to characterize his Administration — and all of liberalism in America today — what authors Fred Siegel and Joel Kotkin termed in City Journal this week Obama’s “New Authoritarianism.” Frustrated by the unwillingness of the people’s representatives to enact his agenda wholesale, Obama has, from early in his Administration, sought to enact a series of proposals through administrative fiat, not the legislative process:

The Democrat-controlled Senate rejected his cap-and-trade plan, so Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency classified carbon dioxide, the compound that sustains vegetative life, as a pollutant so that it could regulate it under the Clean Air Act.

When the woefully misnamed Employee Free Choice Act–explicitly designed to bolster labor unions’ dwindling membership rolls–was defeated by Congress, the NLRB announced a rule that would implement “snap elections” for union representation, limiting employers’ abilities to make their case to workers and virtually guaranteeing a higher rate of unionization at the expense of workplace democracy.

After an innovation-killing Internet regulation proposal failed to make it through Congress, the Federal Communications Commission announced — on Christmas Eve, no less — that it would regulate the Web anyway, despite even a federal court’s ruling that it had no authority to do so.

In its push for national education standards, the Education Department decided to tie waivers for the No Child Left Behind law to requirements that states adopt those standards, shutting Congress out of the effort.

Rather than push Congress to repeal federal laws against marijuana use, the Department of Justice (DOJ) simply decided it would no longer enforce those laws.

While these efforts are all aimed at circumventing the legislative process, none was so brazen as his four illegal appointments. Last week, Obama went one step further: He violated not just the spirit of the Constitution, which vests in Congress the power to make laws, but the letter of the law as well.

The move is “a breathtaking violation of the separation of powers,” explain former U.S. Attorney General Ed Meese and Heritage colleague Todd Gaziano, a former attorney in DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel, in a Washington Post column. “[N]ever before has a president purported to make a ‘recess’ appointment when the Senate is demonstrably not in recess,” they note. “That is a constitutional abuse of a high order.”

Dr. Matthew Spalding, vice president of American Studies and director of the B. Kenneth Simon Center for Principles and Politics at The Heritage Foundation, explains that this “new despotism” — a government where regulations and unilateral actions replace republican governance — runs entirely counter to the Founders’ vision of America:

The greatest political revolution since the American Founding has been the shift of power away from the institutions of constitutional government to an oligarchy of unelected experts. They rule over virtually every aspect of our daily lives, ostensibly in the name of the American people but in actuality by the claimed authority of science, policy expertise, and administrative efficiency.

If this regime becomes the undisputed norm — accepted not only among the intellectual and political elites, but also by the American people, as the defining characteristic of the modern state — it could well mark the end of our great experiment in self-government.

President Obama’s actions are exactly the kind that the Founders feared and sought to guard against. His illegal appointments usurp power from the American people’s duly elected representatives, and the regulations they will promulgate will, undoubtedly, contribute to the unabated growth of the undemocratic administrative state.

Now that the President has crossed the threshold of constitutionality, there really is no telling where he may stop. There is a clear trend here, however, and it leads further and further from the constitutional order. With these illegal appointments, the President has taken to new heights his disdain for the separation of powers. Whether it will stop here depends on Congress — Will lawmakers of both parties reassert the legislature’s constitutional authority and take a stand against Obama’s arrogant new authoritarianism?

The group State Legislators for Legal Immigration has taken on President Obama. Three of the members are from Florida: Representatives Ray Pilon (District 69), Gayle Harrell (District 81) and William D. Snyder (District 82). This coalition of state legislators sent the following press release about President Obama’s backdoor amensty:

State Legislators for Legal Immigration (SLLI), founded by Pennsylvania State Representative Daryl Metcalfe, denounced the recent executive order of the Obama administration to re-prioritize and individually review more than 300,000 illegal alien deportation cases.

The new mandate will require the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice to review all current deportation cases, as well as new cases, to weed out the “low-priority” illegal aliens. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) personnel were also instructed in a memorandum dated June 17, 2011 to use “prosecutorial discretion” when determining whether to pursue a deportation case. The memo includes a list of “positive factors that should prompt particular care and consideration” including: individuals present in the United States since childhood; pregnant or nursing women; and minors and elderly individuals.

“This deplorable act of treasonous deceit circumvents the balance of power established by our Founding Fathers in Article 4, Section 4 of the United States Constitution, established to protect all 50 states against invasion,” said Metcalfe. “Halting the deportation process to individually review each and every deportation case is a premeditated executive action to obstruct all deportations in favor of blanket amnesty.”

According to a recent Rasmussen Report poll, 61 percent of likely U.S. voters believe that gaining control of the border is a more important immigration reform measure versus only 31 percent who favor amnesty as a top priority, a margin of 2 to 1.

By Constitutional definition, it is the job of President of the United States to enforce the laws of this nation. This is just another in a long list of examples of the Obama regime deliberately and systematically trying to destroy the greatest nation ever devised by mankind,” said Arkansas State Representative Jon Hubbard. “If the possibility of buying illegal alien votes were not involved, Obama would have no interest whatsoever in protecting those who are in this country illegally.”

Allowing “low priority” illegal aliens to remain in the United States will only further increase the tax burden on hardworking legal residents. Illegal aliens will continue to have access to public benefits and public education, as well as overcrowding the courts, emergency rooms and prisons. The ICE memorandum also allows for lenient deportation consideration to illegal aliens pursuing an education in the United States, thus establishing a “DREAM Act” atmosphere in the American education system at the expense of law-abiding citizens, without legislative action.

“By imposing ‘Executive Amnesty,’ the Obama administration has effectively downgraded the federal government from AWOL in fulfilling its Constitutional duty to protect the lives, liberty, property and jobs of American citizens against foreign invasion to a fully complicit accomplice in eroding America’s national and economic sovereignty,” said Metcalfe. “Granting blanket amnesty to illegal alien invaders further demonstrates the Obama administration’s blatant disregard for his oath of office, the Constitution and the rule of law.”

Formed to demand full cooperation among federal, state and local governments to eliminate all economic attractions and incentives that continue to lure illegal aliens across America’s unsecured borders, lawmakers from 41 state legislatures, or more than 80 percent of the nation, have now signed on as members of SLLI.

Hey, you know what the beleaguered American economy could really use right now? More special-interest mandates imposed by the White House on employers and taxpayers. Team Obama is “Winning the Future” by strangling it in red, green and rainbow-colored tape.

In a hapless bid to mollify minority politicians and criminal flash mobs of jobless hooligans in their districts across the country, the White House last week issued an executive order “establishing a coordinated government-wide initiative to promote diversity and inclusion in the federal workforce.” Apparently, as record numbers of people collect food stamps and unemployment benefits, what’s really eating at them isn’t their hopeless dependency. It’s the skin color, national origin and gender breakdown of the Nanny State drones doling out their public benefits.

“Only” 39 percent of the federal workforce is made up of minorities and “only” 43.9 percent is female, President Obama’s diversity mandarins decry. But disproportionality does not equal automatic discrimination. How about this: Let’s see the Obama campaign meet fantastical diversity goals for its own donor base before forcing them on the publicly subsidized federal workforce.

While Obama lolls around Martha’s Vineyard with corporate CEOs, Ivy League profs and Hollywood celebrities, his minions at the Office of Personnel Management are now hard at work developing strategies, goals and timetables to meet racial proportionality targets.

Presumably, these will supersede the pre-existing plethora of “diversity” rules long enforced by the racial preference bureaucracy. It’s the bean counters’ stimulus.

The inconvenient truth, of course, is that government-engineered “diversity” has already produced scores of minority-dominated pockets across the elite federal civilian sector. But forcing both public and private employers to hire-by-racial-numbers has done nothing to solve chronic unemployment and underemployment among black Americans outside the Beltway. The jobless rate among blacks is a sky-high 15.6 percent.

You know what else won’t benefit black unemployed Americans all that much? The new White House executive order granting mass deportation waivers. To mollify open-borders activists, Obama signed a blanket directive of immigration non-enforcement last week that will grant reprieves to at least an estimated 2.1 million “DREAM Act” illegal alien students and workers. Instead of deportation papers, they’ll be served work authorization permits and green lights to attend publicly supported colleges and universities. Those who refuse to hire or admit these waiver golden ticket winners will face the certain and immediate legal and political wrath of La Raza, the American Civil Liberties Union, Catholic leaders and the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

When Obama rolls out his hodge-podge jobs plan after descending from Martha’s Vineyard, he’ll undoubtedly tout a regulatory rollback that the administration claims will save $10 billion over five years. But what about the costs of all the pander-mandates they’re furiously heaping on taxpayers as 2012 nears?

According to the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of the last DREAM Act proposal (which failed in December on a bipartisan vote), the amnesty now in place by administrative fiat would “increase projected deficits by more than $5 billion in at least one of the four consecutive 10-year-periods starting in 2021.” And that doesn’t include the costs of all the unlimited family members that the millions of DREAM Act beneficiaries will eventually be able to bring to the U.S.

Hispanic politicians can pretend it’s not a zero-sum game. But the rest of us can’t afford such delusions. Indeed, it’s a self-perpetuating, voter-recruitment racket for the Democratic Party. Among the first White House deportation waiver beneficiaries: an illegal alien student from Mexico who led protests on Capitol Hill for the DREAM Act and another left-wing activist from Mexico who was able to evade deportation by marrying her lesbian lover.

On Monday, black Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters hectored an Obama jobs official to spell out exactly which Americans were suffering under the Democrats’ failed policies. “Let me hear you say ‘black,'” she taunted at an economic forum. The crowd whooped it up. But it’s cronies of color like Waters who have joined hands with the open-borders alliance, backed every special-interest bailout and hyped diversity for diversity’s sake as the cures for her community’s ills.

Dear President Obama, “Now is the time for all American’s to rise up and speak with a loud voice. 2012 will be upon us before we know it and there is no time to waste. This is the time to tell your family and friends to get involved. This is the time to get them informed and this is the time to get them involved. America hangs in the balance my friends. Our very … Read More

Now is the time for all American’s to rise up and speak with a loud voice. 2012 will be upon us before we know it and there is no time to waste. This is the time to tell your family and friends to get involved. This is the time to get them informed and this is the time to get them involved. America hangs in the balance my friends. Our very way of life is being challenged like never before in our history. Look around you, our very existenc … Read More

Mr. President the Chinese want their Money Back! All the eloquent speeches from the Anointed One will not improve our economy nor is it in any way shape or form going to create jobs. We now have a President that is so full of himself that America is suffering another financial setback that all the Kings men and all the Kings Czars cannot put back together again. The good news is that America is waking up and we have put real American Patriots in … Read More

To President Obama and all 535 Voting members of the Legislature It is now Official that the Majority of you are Corrupt Morons The U.S. Postal Service was established in 1775. You have had 234 years to get it right and it is broke. Social Security was established in 1935. You have had 74 years to get it right and it is broke. Fannie Mae was established in 1938. You have had 71 years to get it right and it is broke. War on Poverty started in 19 … Read More

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